IT was not exactly the most auspicious of starts but it could not be helped. Scheduled to take place in plenty of time for the evening news bulletins last September 12, international events conspired to leave the Conservative high command with no choice but to postpone the result of last summer's leadership election by 24 hours.

One year on and the timing of the Friday 13th first anniversary of Iain Duncan Smith's victory could hardly have been described as perfect. Unless, of course, you were a Labour party spin doctor. In which case it was a gift.

A predictable cheap shot, responded their Tory rivals as they pointed to yet another speech from the leader focusing on public services and reaching out to the "vulnera-ble" as evidence of how the party as well as the debate has moved on in the last 12 months.

Less easy for them to dismiss though is a much more significant anniversary coming up on Monday. September 16, 1992, is - and probably forever will be - better known as Black Wednesday.

If the day Britain crashed out of the exchange rate mechanism had come before the General Election of that year rather than after then it's a safe bet that John Major would never have won a popular mandate.

Instead Neil and Glenys would have moved into Number 10, and, surely by now, the Tories would at the very least be hot on the heels of a Labour government - if not adjusting to being back in power themselves.

Under such a scenario, it's not inconceivable to think that the summer just gone might have seen Tony Blair and Gordon Brown slugging it out for their party's leadership.

As it is, it marks the day that the Tories fell behind Labour in the polls. And so, apart from the briefest of blips at the time of September 2000's fuel protests, it has remained.

A party so long seen as the natural party of government is still showing no signs of ceasing to be anything other than the opposition. That despite two changes of leader since being booted out at the ballot box.

Entering a second decade still nine points behind in the polls, it's hardly surprising that pundits are beginning to wonder if Iain Duncan Smith will turn out to be "the Neil Kinnock of the Tories" making them once again fit and fighting for office, after all.

Certainly, the march of IDS ever onwards towards those goals is not instantly apparent.

Let's put aside the opinion polls - and with surveys in recent months showing 71pc believe Duncan Smith will never be PM and 66pc consider the party to have lost its way mean Central Office will probably be happy to do just that.

Raw results are hardly more encouraging. One analysis has it that this May's English council election results were even worse for the party than the comparable set under William Hague. The odd win here was countered by the odd loss there.

If the Conservative fight back is to begin at the grassroots then there's little sign of it yet.

Although they may be too scattered and sporadic to offer any truly significant insight as to how the ground lies in Wales, the council by-elections that have been the only test of how the Tories might fare in Wales under their new UK leader show a similarly depressing story - no gains, one loss.

In the Ogmore by-election for Westminster, as in the Ipswich contest, the party failed to see any increase in its vote. It's true that neither of these snap polls may have provided the Tories with the kind of realistic chance for the sort of by-election success that a party needs to gain momentum. Duncan Smith had little chance to make an impression before Ipswich, and Og-more was never going to be fertile territory.

But you now have to look back 20 years, to Mitcham and Morden in June 1982, for the last Conservative gain in a Commons byelection.

Although there are plenty on the Tory benches who say the party cannot simply wait for the pendulum to bounce back in their favour, Duncan Smith might reasonably expect a contest sooner rather than later that does allow for a proper chance to test the waters in a swing seat.

There are, after all, scores of Labour seats first won in 1997 which it may have retained four years later but did so with markedly less enthusiasm, suggesting voters are impatient for delivery on public services.

This summer's events though mean it remains highly questionable as to whether the Tories are yet ready to capitalise on those frustrations.

With the recess just weeks away, the scene was set for the Tories finally to strike: the stock markets were volatile, the unions were revolting, and the Government was under fire on a whole range of issues - not least its handling of the foot-and-mouth crisis.

Faced with such an open goal, what did the Tories do? Start an unseemly scrap amongst themselves, of course, culminating in the messy replacement of former - and arguably the most likely future - leadership challenger David Davis as party chairman with Theresa May.

As if that was not bad enough - and even Davis described it as "a bad fortnight for the Conservative party" - the silly season continued with rumours of breakaway parties and mutterings from the far-right Monday Club that MPs banned from attending their meetings were still "in close contact".

For the one step forward in dealing with race by sacking Ann Winterton from the front bench earlier in the year when she made a racist joke, here was one step backwards.

In one recent interview, Duncan Smith admitted, "We have reached what I call base camp - it is now time to move on from the base camp."

The next few months will show whether he can do that. Drawing a line under the internal squabbling should be relatively straightforward.

Though they could have done without them, this summer's snipings from the sidelines were nowhere near as vicious as in previous years. So Duncan Smith's claim that the party is settled looks a reasonable one -most remarkably so on the issue of Europe that has bedevilled it for the past decade.

How the party fills the growing clamour for some hard policy proposals, beginning at the party's annual conference, will be a more telling test of the leader.

A three-week national tour that will follow the gathering in Bournemouth and taking in every major city and centre ought to begin to address the fact that a large proportion of the population still have no idea who he is, and even less of what he's about.

As he embarks on that tour, the need to make a good impression will be most pressing in the very parts of the UK where his party is currently worst represented.

For, next May, it will be the devolution elections in Wales and Scotland, just as much as another round of English local elections, that will be seen as an indicator of where IDS is taking his party.

In Scotland, the polls are particularly bleak - throwing up the prospect of the party losing seats and the more remote one of it being overtaken by the Scottish Socialist Party.

Will Wales - which so nearly derailed his leadership campaign with the unmasking of campaign vice-chairman Edgar Griffin as a BNP helper on the side - be his salvation?

One well-placed source speculates it is still not beyond the realms of possibility that the party could yet see its number of seats decrease next May. Such are the vagaries of the voting system that even a higher share of the vote by three or four points might leave the party on its current nine seats.

The target remains though to pick up enough seats to go on and challenge Plaid Cymru's claims to be the official opposition in 2007. Yet requests for central party funding to conduct an internal poll to work out where are the best chances for gains are understood to have so far fallen on deaf ears.

As he looks for the launch-pad to turn round his party's fortunes that has eluded him in his first year in the job, IDS might find himself looking at that request again this autumn. Or facing up to his own Black Thursday next May.